LEGER: Trudeau, heresy and words you never hear in politics

Justin Trudeau should be able to change his mind on the long-gun registry and say so when his party has been wrong, writes columnist Dan Leger. (FRANK GUNN / CP)

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Today’s lesson is about the words you never hear from politicians: “I don’t know” and “I was wrong.” These simple expressions are part of daily life, helping to maintain civil relations. In fact, most of us consider people who can’t say “I was wrong” as egomaniacs or worse.

Yet they are phrases foreign to governments, along with “the opposition’s criticisms are well placed;” and to opposition parties: “the minister is doing a good job.” Much that is wrong with politics arises from this willing denial of awareness. Politicians think they can’t be successful if they operate on a human level that the rest of us consider normal.

Who’s to blame? Political leaders, advisers and strategists, for sure. But mostly, it’s people like me. Even though we decry the absence of independent thought among MLAs and MPs, journalists are the first to slam anything that resembles it. A change of opinion is treated like heresy. It’s news.

I remember interviewing campaign managers of all three parties in the opening days of an election campaign here in Nova Scotia. They all insisted that “no matter what happens, we will stick to our game plan and our message.”

Each party planned to stay with a pre-ordained strategy through to the end, no matter what. They’d find out on election day whether it made sense to voters, but they would stick to the plan. They feared media stories about internal inconsistency.

Then once elected, it’s all orchestration. Everyone sings from the same song sheet, all the time. The central committee, premier or prime minister’s office, enforces this and party orthodoxy is repeated without variance lest someone go “off message.” Heaven forfend.

Because no sooner does a politician wander out of his or her ideological rut than reporters and commentators seize on it as evidence of inconsistency. In politics, that’s seen as moral failure. As for changing your mind? Forget it. Politicians aren’t given that luxury. They must insist they are right, even when they’re wrong.

Yet in our own lives, we change our minds every day and no one finds it unusual. We’re human. We counteract unsound or hurtful decisions and if we’re honest, we admit when we’re wrong. Why can’t politicians do that? Because of people like me.

We pounce on anything that sounds like introspection and self-doubt as a weakness. Party members must never stray from doctrine, lest the policy and therefore the party seem imperfect. Indiscipline must never see the light of day, even when it’s raging behind the scenes. Weirdly, parties think we can’t see through the sham.

Hence the sheeplike tradition of party discipline, which reaches the extreme among the robotic federal Conservatives. They are the party of talking points and they stick to them no matter what, even when making no sense.

The Tories often seem like automatons, but why? What happens when a politician actually goes off message? It becomes a big story.

Take Justin Trudeau and the long-gun registry. Trudeau told a CBC interviewer that the registry was a failure and shouldn’t be revived. All manner of hell broke loose.

Liberals, anti-gun Canadians and many progressive voters were shocked. But they weren’t the only ones. There was a three-day media circus. A Sun columnist called Trudeau “a dunce” even though Trudeau was expressing views widely held by conservatives.

But wasn’t the Liberal golden boy just stating the obvious? The long-gun registry did little to control gun crime and it turned into an expensive bureaucratic failure. No matter where you stand on gun control, the registry failed because it didn’t do what it was supposed to do.

Within the struggling Liberal party, Trudeau’s comment approached the heretical. A potential party leader changed his mind on a policy the Liberals had clung to for years, even as it killed their support in rural Canada. Liberals created the gun registry, so they can’t bring themselves to disavow it.

That is absurd. Trudeau should be able to change his mind and say so when his party has been wrong. Yes, politicians should be consistent and maintain clear ideals. But they shouldn’t get beaten up simply for being human.

Dan Leger is a freelance journalist in Halifax. Twitter: @dantheeditor